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“Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best,” the British writer, actor, and raconteur Sir Peter Ustinov once said. “They are merely the people who got there first.” It’s a discomfiting thought. As with our romantic attachments, we like to believe that our friendships are meant to be. Sure, they all have to start somewhere – the schoolyard, the workplace, the supermarket, the bar – but those initial meetings are just the threshold to relationships built on deeper bonds, shared interests, common values. Aren’t they?

Perhaps not. A recent research report from the University of Leipzig, Germany, argues that the development of friendships can be profoundly influenced by such random factors as proximity or group membership – or, in the case of the study’s freshmen guinea pigs, who you happen to sit next to on the first day of class. On that first day, 54 psychology majors rated how likeable and interesting they found each other. But when the development of friendships within the class was evaluated a year later, the students’ physical position within the classroom was found to be just as significant a factor.

“Thus,” the researchers concluded, “becoming friends may indeed be due to chance.” Such ideas might seem especially unsettling because, it appears, we need friendship now more than ever. The great social and geographical mobility of the past half-century have taken a toll on traditional family and neighborhood bonds, as Robert Putnam’s 2000 book “Bowling Alone” showed. But, according to research published in the American Sociological Review in 2006, the last couple of decades have been especially hard on friendship. In 1985, the average US citizen had three friends in whom to confide intimacies; by 2004, the figure had slipped to two, and one American in four had no confidants at all. Rather than wondering where these people are going wrong, the Leipzig report suggests we should ask whether they were dealt a bum hand.

Since then, however, something radical has happened to friendship: Facebook, MySpace and other social networking. Thanks to the Internet, it has never been easier to make connections based on shared interests or personality traits, regardless of physical location or other contingent factors. Without seating assignments, the online world could take chance out of friendship.

The worry, however, is that we’re exchanging random but deep bonds for targeted but superficial ones. You can poke anyone you like, but do you know them as well as the kid you sat next to in elementary school?